Please consider supporting PoliticusUSA by becoming a subscriber.
In the week after the deadly flash flood that killed hundreds in Texas, the talk has been about Jeffrey Epstein, responsibility for the government response, and general chaos surrounding Trump.
The one thing that has not been discussed is climate change, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) redirected the conversation back to a crisis that Trump is trying to bury.
Sen. Sanders said in a statement:
In the midst of everything else going on, it’s easy to ignore the extraordinary planetary crisis we face from climate change. But we just can’t allow ourselves to do that.
The past 10 years have been the warmest 10 years on record. 2024 was the warmest year in recorded history. January 2025 was the hottest January on record. Western Europe just had its hottest June on record. The recent heat wave in the United States put nearly 190 million Americans under heat advisories and broke heat records in more than 280 locations. Over the past 60 years, the frequency of heat waves in the United States has tripled. According to a new study from Yale University, 64% of Americans think global warming is affecting the weather in the U.S. and almost HALF say they have personally experienced its effects.
From May 2024 to May 2025, 4 billion people — half of the world’s population — experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat due to climate change. Climate change exacerbated Hurricane Helene last fall in the American Southeast, flooding in Texas this past week and in Vermont and Brazil last summer, recent wildfires in Canada and Los Angeles, and health waves in the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan.
And what is President Trump’s response? He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats to our national security.
Donald Trump is putting the planet and future generations at risk for the short-term profits of his fossil fuel executive friends.
Trump is giving the fossil fuel industry exactly what they wanted when they wrote all of those campaign checks to him as the Republican candidate in the summer of 2024. The clean energy progress that was made under Biden has been erased by Trump and the Republican congressional majorities.
It is not just a political shift, but it is also, as Senator Sanders pointed out, an endangering of the planet.
Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax, but the bad policy decisions that Trump is making on energy policy are harming the American people for decades. Trump is also raising energy bills for the American people by contracting the energy market and giving people fewer choices.
Bernie Sanders is in his eighties, but he is fighting for the future of the planet.
The crisis is getting worse, even if Trump is trying to get people to ignore it.
What do you think of Sen. Sanders’s statement on climate change? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Source link
